Cumacea of Greece: a preliminary checklist

Abstract Background The first attempt to compile the checklist of Cumacea of Greece was made in the context of the "Greek Biodiversity Database" project (2005-2008) coordinated by the Aristotle University of Thessaloniki. Since then, only scattered information on new elements of the Greek cumacean fauna has been available. The objectives of the present study were to update and cross-check taxonomically all cumacean species records from Greek waters for inaccuracies and omissions according to the recent literature and current taxonomic status. New information The updated checklist of Cumacea of Greece, which was built within the framework of the LifeWatch Greece Research Infrastructure (ESFRI) project (2013-2015) coordinated by the Hellenic Centre for Marine Research, comprises 62 species, classified in 24 genera and 6 families. However, a few more records need further cross-checking with the current literature resources.


Introduction
The most important contributions to the Greek records of the taxonomic group of Cumacea have been made by Reyss (1974) and Bacescu (1982). Later on, Stefanidou (1996), Madurell and Cartes (2003), Mühlenhardt-Siegel (2009), Coll et al. (2010) and Koulouri et al. (2013) have provided new species records and distribution data on the Greek cumaceans. Most cumaceans are hyperbenthic animals, i.e. they are swimming bottomdependent macrofaunal organisms, performing seasonal or diel vertical migrations into the water column (Brunel et al. 1978). According to Dauvin and Vallet (2006), the hyperbenthos constitutes one of the dominant faunal components of the so called benthic boundary layer (BBL). The BBL is defined as the layer of water adjacent to the seabed and can be extended from a few centimetres to tens of metres, depending, both temporally and spatially, on various physical and biogeochemical processes (Marshall and Merrett 1977). This dynamic zone is characterized by higher concentrations of particles and biomass than the water layer immediately above it. Hyperbenthic sledges are commonly used for sampling these macrofaunal organisms. However, most sledges do not sample the supernatant layer above the seabed in order to avoid contamination of the samples with sediment and therefore there are still technical difficulties in sampling within this particular habitat (Mees and Jones 1997, Eleftheriou 2013, Koulouri et al. 2013. A first attempt to compile the checklist of Cumacea was made in the context of the "Greek Biodiversity Database" project (2005Database" project ( -2008 coordinated by the Aristotle University of Thessaloniki. The documented occurrence of these marine species in Greek waters was recorded in a database that was set up online in 2010. The reference of  was specially created by the World Register of Marine Species (WoRMS)/European Register of Marine Species (ERMS, now part of WoRMS), for the list of these marine species provided by the Greek Biodiversity Database during the European project PESI.
The aim of the present work was to update the checklist of Cumacea of Greek waters. For this purpose, older lists were updated according to the recent literature and current taxonomic status.

Materials and methods
The checklist of Cumacea of Greece (Suppl. material 1) was built in the context of the Life WatchGreece (LWG) Research Infrastructure (ESFRI) project, in which the Greek Taxon Information System (GTIS) was established, as an application that has gathered efforts to develop a complete checklist of species recorded from Greek waters (Bailly et al. 2016, this special collection). The general principles for elaborating the Preliminary Checklist are provided by Bailly et al. (2016). The checklist of Cumacea was constructed on the basis of the species records extracted from the dataset of WoRMS/ERMS for marine species. Then, all recent publications were reviewed and the species reported to date have been added to the list. The classification system followed in the present checklist is the one proposed by the Cumacea World Database (Watling 2005).

Checklist of Cumacea known to occur in Greek waters
Order Cumacea

Discussion
A total of 62 species, classified to 24 genera and 6 families, constitute the updated checklist of Cumacea of Greece. A number of issues aroused during the thorough examination of the checklist of Cumacea of Greece derived from the dataset of WoRMS/ ERMS for marine species . According to Coll et al. (2010), only two records of Iphinoe trispinosa (Goodsir, 1843) from the Mediterranean Sea exist. However, according to the revision of the genus Iphinoe by Ledoyer (1965), there are two more records, one from the North Aegean Sea (Stefanidou 1996) and another from the Gulf of Tunis (Ayari and Afli 2003). Moreover, the presence of two cumacean species recorded by Mühlenhardt-Siegel (2009) as Campylaspis cf. paeneglabra Stebbing, 1912 andLeptostylis cf. bacescoi Reyss, 1972 in the Mediterranean Sea still remains doubtful and should be confirmed. Therefore, further research is needed for the verification of the presence of these three species in the Greek waters. It is also worth mentioning that 27 cumacean species have been reported from the Turkish territorial waters of the Aegean Sea (Katagan 1983, Katagan 1985, while recently the new species Bodotria parvui was described by Petrescu (2008) from the same area. Though several species reported from the Turkish coasts of the Aegean have not yet been found in Greek territorial waters, they are expected to be recorded as elements of the Greek fauna in the future.